1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a content list display method and a content list display apparatus for displaying a list of content, such as music, movies, and electronic books, on a display screen. Also, the present invention relates to a content selecting and processing method and a content selecting and processing apparatus for selecting a specific piece of content from the content list displayed by the content list display method and processing the selected piece of content.
2. Description of the Related Art
In this specification, “content” means content information of music, video (movies, television broadcasted programs, captured images, and so on), electronic books (text information and still image information of papers, novels, and magazines), guide information, web pages, and programs (including a game program), expressed by signals.
There has been provided a content storing and playing back apparatus capable of storing a large amount of content in a built-in content storing unit, such as a mass storage hard disk or a semiconductor memory, and playing back a piece of content selected by a user.
In such a content storing and playing back apparatus, a list of content stored in the content storing unit is displayed so that a user can select a piece of content from the list. Accordingly, the user can quickly find a desired piece of content from a large amount of content stored in the content storing unit (for example, see Patent Document 1: Japanese Unexamined Patent Application Publication No. 2001-110171).
In the content storing and playing back apparatus, a new piece of content can be captured into the content storing unit via a network, such as the Internet (for example, see Patent Document 2: Japanese Unexamined Patent Application Publication No. 2005-122075).
Typically, in this case, information about a list of distributable content is transmitted from a content distributing server. Thus, a user selects a desired piece of content from the list and requests distribution of the selected piece of content.